Reply #6: I think mark penn was the killer but [View All]

[Cha]

maybe that's just a few of us who got tired of rovian tactics pushing The Decider down our throat for 8 nightmare years.

I read that hilary's campaign got started later than Obama's did..

<snips>

This belief in Hillary’s unassailability fostered a complacency that may cost Clinton more dearly than anyone could have imagined. But at the time, no one recognized what was happening. Instead of launching her presidential campaign, even informally, Clinton and Solis Doyle insisted that no one so much as mention the possibility of a White House bid until after she’d been reelected to the Senate—a move insiders now concede was a serious tactical flaw that allowed Barack Obama’s campaign to take off unchallenged. The error wasn’t simply letting Obama get a head start in raising money. It was failing to realize that the world of political fund-raising had changed dramatically since Bill Clinton had last run for president, in a way that put a premium on different kinds of fund-raisers than the ones to which the Clintons had ties. Campaign-finance reform had banned the large, six-figure “soft-money” contributions the Clintons once relied on from people like Ron Burkle, Steve Bing, and David Geffen. In their place, small, “hard-money” donations took on far greater importance, and a new generation of fund-raisers able to corral many people to write four-figure checks suddenly became the true prize. But many of them—people like Mark Gorenberg, Alan Solomont, and Steve Westly—were not as well known to the Clintons. “I think of the difference as being between ‘writers’ and ‘raisers,’ ” Gorenberg, a venture capitalist who was John Kerry’s biggest fund-raiser in the 2004 election, told me last year. Like Gorenberg, many of the new hard-money fundraisers are tech moguls who hail from a wealth center, Silicon Valley, that barely existed during Bill Clinton’s last run.

With Hillaryland in silent mode, Obama got first crack at those donors. “Not a lot, but some people, were losing sleep about Obama as early as last winter, keeping an eye on his moves and tracking his hires and outreach,” a Clinton insider admitted to me last spring. “There were two reasons nothing happened. First, by admitting he’s a factor, you’re giving him the credibility that you don’t want him to have. Second, everybody thought he would flame out. They didn’t think he could pull a money team and enough talent together to mount a serious challenge.”

Of course, Obama did just that, relying on the new donor class Clinton had ignored. “When Obama came along,” an embittered Clinton aide told me, “suddenly you had your choice of rock star.”

Even after grasping the magnitude of the threat, the Clinton campaign didn’t react quickly..

Lots More..
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4568468